Biosketch
Jain is a theoretical physicist, recognized for the composite-fermion theory of the fractional quantum Hall effect. He is Evan Pugh University Professor and Eberly Chair in Physics at Pennsylvania State University, and Founding Director of Lodha Theoretical Physics Institute, Mumbai.
Jain obtained his entire school education in Sambhar, a rural town in the State of Rajasthan, India. He earned his bachelor’s at Maharaja College, Jaipur, master’s at Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and Ph.D. at Stony Brook University (1985). After postdoctoral fellowships at University of Maryland and Yale University, he returned to Stony Brook University as a faculty in 1989, before moving to the Pennsylvania State University in 1998. In 2026 he was appointed Founding Director of the Lodha Theoretical Physics Institute, Mumbai.
Jain is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences, and a Foreign Fellow of Indian National Science Academy. He is a recipient of the Oliver E. Buckley Prize of the American Physical Society and of the Wolf Prize in Physics.
Research Interests
Jain is a theoretical condensed matter physicist interested in exotic quantum states of electrons in low dimensions. He is best known for his discovery of the emergent particle called the composite fermion, namely an electron binding an even number of quantum mechanical vortices, and for explaining the fractional quantum Hall effect as the integral quantum Hall effect of composite fermions, thereby unifying these two phenomena. Jain and his collaborators have investigated numerous states and properties of composite fermions, including their Fermi sea, fractional quantum Hall effect, superconductivity, Wigner crystal, mass, Fermi wave vector, charged quasiparticles, neutral excitons, spin waves, magnetorotons, skyrmions, magnetic phase transitions, edge states, bilayer states, Bloch ferromagnetism, Hall viscosity, fractional braiding statistics and non-Abelian Majorana modes. Jain also introduced the parton construction of fractional quantum Hall states. His other interests include topological insulators, graphene, one-dimensional quantum liquids, and collective excitations.
Membership Type
Member
Election Year
2021
Primary Section
Section 33: Applied Physical Sciences
Secondary Section
Section 13: Physics